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Red Hat’s Makara team is pleased to announce the availability of the Makara Cloud Application Platform – Developer Preview. Makara is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that allows you to deploy, manage, monitor and auto-scale your new or existing Java and PHP applications in the cloud with little or no modifications. With this release: Makara is now available on the Rackspace Cloud, we’ve introduced a new MongoDB cartridge, support for Amazon micro-instances, 64-bit instance types across all clouds, plus a new security feature that gives administrators the ability to manage their organization’s user accounts across multiple clouds, clusters and applications.

Makara has been supporting the Amazon public cloud for almost a year now, but we kept hearing from devops folks and app developers that they would love to see Makara available on the Rackspace Cloud. Ask and you shall receive! Getting started with Makara on the Rackspace Cloud is easy. Just head on over to the Try-It link on makara.com to get your trial started. For those of you not familiar with Makara and who’d like to learn more about how it works, check out our Resources page for videos, tutorials and how-to guides. The Rackspace Cloud team is also hosting a webinar on March 17, 2011 at 12 p.m. PT where Issac Roth, director of product marketing, Cloud Solutions for Red Hat, who joined the company via Makara, will be demonstrating how to deploy, manage, monitor and scale your Java or PHP app on the Rackspace Cloud. Plus, he’ll cover the new features in this release.

And speaking of features, we are really excited to offer native support for MongoDB. We got some great insight from the folks over at 10Gen on where the pain points were in deploying, managing and scaling MongoDB, and we listened. In this release you gain the “point and click” ability to deploy a MongoDB cluster onto the cloud, including routers, config, shard and replica servers. Being that this is our first release with support for MongoDB, we know it might be a little rough around the edges, but we are planning on building out the feature set with your feedback and help. Please let us know what you think by engaging the Makara team and other users on IRC at irc.freenode.net, room #makara or on our JBoss.org community page.

In this release we’ve also added support for Amazon’s micro-instances, as well as 64-bit instance types across all clouds. This means both more affordable instances and bigger instances with more memory, bigger caches and better performance.

The other cool feature in this release is the introduction of the concept of “organizations”. With Makara, a single user who is designated as an organization’s administrator can have an interface to manage all the organization’s developer accounts across clouds, clusters and applications. This means that an administrator can gain visibility and control around how cloud resources are being accessed and consumed.

Finally, as many of you know, Makara was acquired by Red Hat in November 2010. Under Red Hat, we are providing the current version of the Makara Cloud Application Platform as a free Developer Preview. This Developer Preview is unsupported, though we will participate in community forums and IRC to offer advice and discussion. We expect that future versions will be incorporated into the upcoming Red Hat PaaS offering - stay tuned for more exciting news on this. For more information concerning Red Hat’s PaaS and Cloud Foundations offerings, visit the Cloud Foundations website.

If you still have questions, drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you.